Expectations, Sanity, Acting-out

Expectations, Sanity, Acting-out

Recently, in the utterly fascinating exchange between Andrew Klavan and Spencer Klavan featured in Andrew’s Substack, The New Jerusalem ((1) THE NEW JERUSALEM | Andrew Klavan | Substack), father and son have observed that a large number of people in our society are acting in ways that in other times we might have associated with clinical madness. They have also observed that this behavior is more common at the left end of the spectrum in the culture wars. I have found nothing material with which to disagree, and find the exchange very illuminating. But I want to focus less on the pathology of polarization and more on the pathogenesis, recognizing that once I use terms relating to pathology I am stating that what is experienced by many as normal is not normal; that reality testing is not intact.

In speaking of pathogenesis I am referring to causation, origins. There have been very many who have written, for a long time, about what’s wrong in society. Fewer have written about causation. My own observation relates to conversations with veterans of the Red Army who served in WWII, conversations recently revivified by my reading of Prit Buttar’s new second volume of his history of the 1941—1944 siege of Leningrad. This second volume (2024) is entitled Hero City: Leningrad 1943—44, and completes the account begun in the 2023 volume To Besiege a City: Leningrad 1941—42. Both titles are imprints of Osprey Press.

The siege of Leningrad lasted 872 days. The city never fell, but lost about 47% of her prewar population of 3.2 million people. The majority of deaths were caused by starvation. When Dmitry Shostakovich’s monumental Symphony No. 7, in C Major (Leningrad), received its first performance in its namesake city on 9 August 1942, it did so despite the fact that a number of musicians (who also served in the front lines) collapsed and died during rehearsals. The starvation of so many was not an accident of the siege; it was the object. Hitler had decided that for the Wehrmacht to enter Leningrad would have been to incur the costs of block-by-block street fighting (as happened to Germany’s cost at Stalingrad), and that starvation would be used as a weapon. Starving the populace of the occupied territories was deliberate policy. The goal was to eliminate the native population in order to make room for German settlers. It is against this background of “facts on the ground” that the experience of Red Army soldiers is instructive about the causes of how beliefs are acted upon today, of how passionately-held (if less often effectively argued) beliefs are acted upon.

By 1943 on the Leningrad front, those soldiers of the Red Army who had survived the battles of 1941—42 continued to fight despite the fact that they had witnessed untold casualties in their own units. (As a rule of thumb—and as testified to by the experience of the French Army in WWI—whenever a military unit reaches the cumulative level of 100% casualties over time, it loses all military effectiveness.) These soldiers continued to fight in part because they had no choice. To question orders resulted in prompt execution. At Stalingrad, for example, executions took place for “defeatist behavior”, like suggesting that charging straight at German machine guns was a bad idea. The Soviet Union executed the equivalent of an entire division of its soldiers during the Stalingrad campaign. But lack of choice and fear were not the only or even primary reasons that soldiers continued to fight in a campaign far longer than that at Stalingrad. They fought partly because they now had more reliable news of what the Germans had done in the occupied territories—and so wanted revenge—but even more so because of their own expectations.

Survivors of 1941—42 continued to fight in 1943 because they did not expect to live. This testimony can be compared to what Paul Fussell wrote about in his book Wartime (Oxford U.P., 1989), that combat infantry—if they continue to live—evolve through three stages in their approach to battle. The first is “I’m special. God will not let it happen to me.” Then they observe those around them, including other “specials”, die. The second stage is “It can happen to me, but if I’m extra careful/effective, I can make sure it doesn’t.” Then they see that some of those who die are the best soldiers, that death in combat is random. The third stage is “It shall happen to me. I’m dead already.” It’s in the third stage that combat infantry become particularly effective.

Clearly, the Red Army learned. But for those who survived 1941—42, the third stage had arrived, so they continued to fight because they did not expect to live. Is there any parallel between this phenomenon and the acting-out that we experience at the edges of the culture wars, the insane behavior observed in mass protests? If so, two causative mechanisms can be posited: (1) people have been so worn down, so traumatized by ongoing conflict, that they don’t expect to experience the triumph of their cause. Why not fight, why not live within an absolutist position, when you won’t see the result? (2) The ongoing strife of the culture wars is so stressful that it can be likened to combat, and the expectation on “non-survival” is akin to the PTSD that used to be called “combat fatigue”.

The experience of most soldiers outside of the overwhelming stress of actual combat is boredom, “hurry up and wait” while scrounging food, comfort, some diversion. Our culture can sometimes resemble a hurry-up-and-wait pattern of time-wasting. It can take on aspects of scrounging because of anxiety over employment, debt, etc. It certainly focuses on diversion in the absence of an agreed overarching narrative of purpose. When the culture’s underlying belief system is that “It’s all random”, our culture warriors start to move into the third phase of reality perception, that—because it’s random—I don’t expect to make it, and I’ll just keep doing what’s needed now.

Comparing everyday life to combat is, of course, a stretch. Although the conditions of wartime, which include the frustration of all the things you can’t get anymore, the petty tyrannies of those higher in the pecking order, the uncertainties over whether anything that is reported is actually true—these conditions are at least mimicked in the 24/7 news cycle of everything being a crisis—it’s still not the same as facing a deadly enemy. But, if all there is is this life anyway, it’s easier to understand why acting out starts to “make sense”. I have to win now! Seeing the enemy as human becomes a luxury. In other words, the Klavans are certainly correct that in their discussions of the many ways in which too many people now act crazy. But I believe that this behavior is itself the result of the underlying craziness of a belief system that makes all life into a zero-sum game, and a game limited to this life only. If I believe in an afterlife—quite apart from what I might believe about it, in terms of how I may be judged—my perspective is broader than if I believe that this is all there is, that “Life stinks, and then you die.”

Expand the horizon: expand the perspective. The broader the perspective, the less particular and crazy it is. The ultimate perspective of life-everlasting shifts us from the continuing crisis to “the peace of God which passes all understanding”. How sane.